Really just curious what folks out there deem valuable enough to give money for monthly or annually. As a software engineer I have quite a few that keep me productive and I’ll list a few:
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Obsidian Sync
- YouTube Premium
I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
You still have internet subscription, right? Next: run your own ISP
Parent just needs some fiber, cables, a ditch witch, and a blow torch to get into the nearest backbone.
What all do you run?
At the moment none, I don’t find any of it worth the money. I’m more of; that’s a good thing to pirate.
Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.
Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.
Philosophical monthly support:
- Grapheneos
- Eff
- Tor
- Briar
- Molly
YouTube Premium
Unless you’re doing it for YouTube Music, this seems absurd to me. On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly, and on mobile there’s Revanced or Grayjay.
Anyway, I pay for Nebula.
Nebula
Do you like it? There’s only like 10 creators I watch on YouTube who are there, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to find replacements. If I pay for Nebula, I’d rather ditch YouTube entirely.
And yeah, I use Grayjay and I’m about ready to buy it. I love the new Twitch integration, and some are on Odyssey, so that’s cool. The app seems to use a lot more resources than NewPipe, and it’s missing a few NewPipe features I really like (seeing playlists is the biggest one), but overall it’s pretty good. If it was FOSS I’d buy it today, I’m just hesitating because there’s just too many tradeoffs.
I’m a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.
The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you’d get from them.
But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it’s sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators’ Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I’d be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula’s annual plan, it’s just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).
Honestly, I don’t care about bonus content, I just want the content I have on YouTube elsewhere without ads and tracking, and I’m happy to pay for it.
The only ones I’m interested in are:
- Not Just Bikes
- Half as Interesting
I looked through the rest, and I honestly haven’t heard of any of them. I don’t watch a ton of YouTube, but I do follow a few channels. Here are some of my favorites, by category:
Tech news:
- Level1Techs
- Louis Rossmann - on Odysee
- Gamer’s Nexus
- Optimum Tech
- Digital Foundry
- The Phawx
Privacy/advocacy:
- Audit the Audit
- Mental Outlaw
- NBTV - Naomi Brockwell
Math/science:
- Stand Up Maths
- Psyshow
- Steve Mould
- Tech Ingredients
Other news (balances liberal bias here on lemmy):
- Reason TV - could replace with podcast; still love Remy vids though
- John Stossel
Misc entertainment:
- Mr. Puzzle
- Lockpickinglawyer
- Jerry Rig Everything
If I had one or two solid channels from each category, I could abandon YouTube. But I don’t know any of the channels there, and I’m not super excited about looking through a bunch of new channels again, it took years to filter through the trash on YouTube…
So Jason just puts out his videos about 4 days early on Nebula. He’s done a small number of Nebula bonus content videos, but not very many. If you like his videos, you might also like CityNerd, Stewart Hicks, City Beautiful, RMTransit, and Hoog which all also cover urbanism.
The HAI crew also operate the Wendover YouTube channel, and under that brand have released a bunch of really good documentaries, including the incredibly moving “Final Years of Majuro”. There’s also the channel “Extremities” from them, which “brings you the stories of how and why the world’s most remote settlements exist”. They have their game show, Jet Lag, which is really good, but I think that’s on YouTube on a delay; they’ve recently also announced an upcoming series called “The Getaway”, but other than the name and being from that crew, no more is known about it. Completely unrelated to them, there’s the channel “neo”, which I find satisfies much the same itch as HAI.
For tech news, there’s The Friday Checkout, OzTalksHW, and TechAltar, but I watch none of those so can’t comment precisely on their content.
No explicit privacy advocacy I’m afraid.
For science, there’s Minute Physics, The Science Asylum, and Real Science which are their ones most similar to the ones you listed, but there are also a whole heap that do science from a different angle, like Atlas Pro, which uses real paper atlases as a framing device for talking about world geography; Tibees, who talks through scientific papers; Tier Zoo, who teaches about animals through the lens of video game logic; and Simon Clark, who is primarily focused on climate change through the lens of what science and technology we can use to help prevent it. I still watch and love Stand Up Maths and Steve Mould on YT though.
Not sure I’d ever say Lemmy has a “liberal” bias. More explicitly anti-liberal, tbh. But still, Nebula has TLDR, who do an impeccable job of producing a BBC or ABC-style news show with an explicit goal of leaving their own personal biases at the door and creating a show that avoids bias as much as humanly possible. Their semi-regular “The Editorial” is excellent, with them going over the mistakes they made and issuing corrections. There’s also J.J. McCullough, who I don’t watch, but have been lead to believe is a right-wing (but not far-right—more the sort of traditional conservative you might have typically expected before the 2000s) creator who seems to cover things in current affairs. And just recently they’ve added a new channel called Morning Brew, which I’m still trying to get a read on, but seems to be news primarily with a business focus. They’ve also recently announced a new news division, but we don’t know exactly what form that’s going to take yet or what sort of content will be coming out of it.
As far a misc entertainment, it’s a very personal thing that’s hard to give recommendations for. NileRed is listed under the science category, but his videos are often so bizarre that I’d say they’re more like light entertainment. There is a huge amount of stuff covering media criticism, some with very serious tones, some much more casual; some looking at the art through specific lenses (there are a couple of queer creators in particular), others who take more of a film production bent, and ones who view it through the lens of pop culture. The film and media categories are probably the strongest part of Nebula. There’s edutainment like Extra History. I have never had an interest in professional tennis, but have found CULT TENNIS to be a shockingly interesting channel (one of the ones I discovered through Nebula). A whole bunch of music channels like 12tone, Mary Spender, and Polyphonic; personally, I find them all far too focused on modern music for my tastes as a classical fan. Also technically listed under the “music” category is Tantacrul, though really I’d say many of his videos should be must-watch for anyone doing any sort of software UX design, even though he’s specifically focussing on music notation/composition software. LegalEagle is weirdly categorised under “news”, which I guess makes sense because a lot of his videos do cover current events, but fundamentally I personally view him as an entertainment channel who talks about the law. If you’re a gamer at all, Razbuten is excellent, especially his “…For Someone Who Doesn’t Really Play Games” series, where he introduces his wife, who is a non-gamer, to various different genres of games.
Personally, I couldn’t ever replace YouTube entirely with Nebula. There’s just way too much stuff on YT, and their discovery algorithm has gotten so good. They’re really good in some niches, and much weaker in others. Some of the niches they’re weak in, they’re pretty obviously never going to enter. Live-streaming gaming, for example. But others they’re expanding into all the time. When I first joined, they didn’t have a single urbanism channel, and now they have most of the big urbanists on YouTube. These days Nebula is big enough that I have to check a couple of times per day to be sure that, if I look at the “latest videos” section of the front page, I don’t miss anything entirely. (Though there’s always the dedicated latest videos page if I did miss something from the front page.) Latest Videos has been a great way that I’ve come across entirely new channels and even niches that I wouldn’t have thought to be interested in before. It’s big, and varied, and growing a lot. I think it’d be hard not for someone to get their money’s worth from it.
Lemmy… “liberal”
Yeah, I should’ve said “leftist” or “socialist.”
I don’t really fit in with Lemmy politically, I’m just here because Reddit has gone too far with tracking and monetization. I would’ve been willing to pay for Reddit if they were privacy-friendly, but that ship has sailed.
TLDR
This looks fantastic! I just watched a video on YouTube (about the Belgian far right party) and it was high quality without all the rage baiting. Thanks!
their discovery algorithm has gotten so good
Eh, I found it just devolves into the popular nonsense I try to avoid with clickbait titles and rage bait style. For privacy reasons, I completely disabled watch history and whatnot, and suggestions are now even worse (no surprise there).
I’m trying to completely replace YouTube and Google services generally as a rejection of their data collection (hence the “privacy advocacy” section), so I’m looking for an 80% solution. I can hopefully fill in the rest on Odysee and Rumble (looks like LPL is there), but those are filled with far-right nonsense, and Peertube seems kinda dead, so I’ll need a solid base and only look for a handful of replacements.
Anyway, thanks! You’ve given a lot of great options, so I’ll try it out and see if I can finally drop YouTube, at least for subscribed content (YouTube is still king for finding specific music). I don’t really care about bonus content, I just want something like YouTube that doesn’t have ads, tracking, and clickbait, and I’m willing to pay.
Another platform that I haven’t yet signed up for, but probably will before too long, is Dropout. Created by the former head of the YouTube channel CollegeHumor after the old owners collapsed at the hands of a private equity firm, it now hosts a whole range of comedy content, from game shows (Um, Actually is mostly available on YouTube, and is excellent), to sketch comedy (clips from Game Changer and Make Some Noise are available as YT Shorts—I’ve seen them called a spiritual successor to Who’s Line Is It Anyway, especially after Wayne Grady guest starred in an episode), and their D&D show Dimension 20. It’s entirely in that “misc entertainment” category, and all from one single studio, but it’s shockingly good for that.
Cool, that also sounds right up my alley. I’ll check it out. :)
Oh, another thing just occurred to me. There are also Nebula-exclusive podcasts. I listen to The Urbanist Agenda, hosted by Jason Slaughter, with regular guests including (but not limited to) the other urbanists on Nebula.
You forgot to mention that at least with the newer videos, the videos cut out all the sponsored sections.
Oh, yeah. I guess I just took that as a given. @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works, this is worth knowing too, if you weren’t already aware.
(Though with SponsorBlock, you can achieve much the same thing on YouTube, albeit in a more morally grey way.)
Thanks for the heads up. :)
I don’t use SponsorBlock (but do use ad-block) because creators need to eat, but it’s good to know that nonsense will be gone in Nebula. :)
I actually mostly love Sponsor Block for its non-sponsor things. Stuff like cutting out intro animations, cutting long silences in recorded streams, skipping “interaction reminders” (“don’t forget to like and subscribe”), and occasionally jumping straight to the music in music videos.
I just drop channels that do that nonsense.
I’m okay with a 10-20s sponsor mention at the start or end, but some of them get long (like 1min+) or are right in the middle. Likewise, a quick 3s “like and subscribe” nod at the end is fine, just annoying in the middle.
If a channel is annoying its viewers, I know to avoid it because the content is also likely mediocre. If they truly care about the content, they’ll keep the annoying crap to a minimum.
It has served me pretty well so far.
I’ve never actually used Grayjay. Just heard about it for the first time a few hours ago. To be honest I thought it did support playlists. It sounded like if you sign in, you get access to all your YouTube features like playlists and comments. Shame to see that’s not the case. My Watch Later playlist is so essential to my YouTube viewing, I guess I’ll stick with Revanced for now.
I mean playlists by a channel, not ones you create. I assume you can get those (Grayjay has playlists), but I don’t actually has that feature at all.
I watch some channels with a huge back catalogue, and I’ll often want to watch something in a category from a year or two back. I don’t know how to efficiently find that on Grayjay, but it works fine in NewPipe.
Oh I see. Yeah I do use those from time to time. Would be a shame not to have them, for precisely the reason you describe.
Revanced works perfectly for YouTube music on Android as well.
Good to know!
On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly
That’s my issue. I use YT primarily on my Chromecase and mobile.
Firefox + ublock is clunky.
3rd Party apps are a no-go for my Google Account. To much depends on that to get hacked just because I don’t like ads.
My justification for the price is, that I pay less for that than for Netflix and I use it daily.
Also Creators get a significantly higher cut per view in comparison to regular viewers. So I don’t need to feel bad when I block ads on Desktop and don’t sub their patreon.I mean, it’s something like $7-8 for 6 months via a one-time VPN payment in India or the like. Definitely worth it.
Nah. Just donate a little to the creators you like and block the ads. Everyone would be better for it except Google.
I block the ads by using SmartTube on my Shield Pro. But for my AppleTV 4K, I prefer paying a few bucks for Premium for a smooth experience ☻.
- Proton
- Bitwarden
- VPN
- Spotify
All I need as a student. I have a few open source projects that I aim to support monthly, as soon as I get my first paycheck after I’m finished with my degree, might count those as subscriptions then.
I really hope ur using chatgpt via api and not their own frontend api is far cheaper and there is a multitude of clients u can use
The one advantage of their front-end is that it’s enabled for live internet search. But yeah it’s not worth the price difference. I’m hardly getting $2 a month vs. the 20 they charge for the front-end.
Yeah I been looking for a frontend that can use an agent style preferably written in langchain capable of such things. I just been using Sydney but its been lab optimised to far and Microsoft are fuckers.
I don’t know if it will meet your needs, but I’ve recently picked up a license to TypingMind and I use the OpenAI API - it’s a very good tool IMO.
I’d prefer something Foss honestly might just have to write it myself at this point.
Yeah I agree, and I hesitated to buy TypingMind, but I figured the $30 or whatever was cheaper than my time.
How do I use the API? I’d be willing to pay for ChatGPT pro if it was cheaper, especially if it was pay per use instead of pay per month
I use better chatgpt its a git repo that Github will host for free for you then google opening api and get urself an api key. Its pay per use u get gpt3.5 as well as gpt4. I still use gpt3.5turbo for most things this cos its way cheaper than 4.
Thanks, I’ll look into that! I also recently found an easy way to run local LLMs on my computer, so I can mix and match.
Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta, Signal.
- Proton
- Nebula
- Deezer
If I used VPNs more frequently and liked streaming music, this would be almost exactly my list
Everyone’s mum’s only fans for online gaming
Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees
Do you off-site backup as well? I don’t have the kind of money necessary to self host an on network and an off-site backup of my data…
I used wasabi BackUp service years ago, it was about $50 a month for my 7 TB, and it took over a month to upload the initial back up. Now, I have about five times that much storage used up and there’s no way I would pay $250 a month for that. All stuff I’ve downloaded from Torrents, so if something bad happened I could get it back again. I save all my torrent files so I could re-download them fairly easily. I also run a raid 6 configuration so I can tolerate up to two drives failing before I lose data.
RAID is not a backup, NAS is not a backup. Obviously there is no reason to backup readily available torrents but it doesn’t sound like you’re backing up at all. Self hosting data integrity is a much harder task than implied.
It’s enough data redundancy for me. Did I state it was a discrete backup? No, but it’s not needed.
deleted by creator
Do you have any decent options for routing a DNS name to a local machine behind NAT? I usually do this with a VPS, but I really don’t like the terms at a lot of VPS services (forced arbitration everywhere).
I paid namecheap for a domain, it was $50 for 8 years. So I guess I lied, I did pay for that ages ago. Then, I use my UniFi Dream Machine firewall to route traffic to my Plex and game servers within my network. It’s great because I have Minecraft.mydomain.com, files.mydomain.com and palworld.mydomain.com that people use to access things. Do note that this requires a static IP from your ISP unless you want to get a dynamic dns service running which isn’t too bad.
Yeah, I don’t have access to dynamic DNS because I’m behind a NAT (ISP gives me a 10.x.x.x address). I can pay for a static IP, but I’d really rather not.
I was hoping there was something like Tailscale where I could forward ports over a VPN and use the VPN host’s IP for my DNS. I can kinda get there with Tailscale’s public DNS, but I can’t use my own (well, I could use a CNAME, but I’d use their certs).
Anyway, it’s a temporary thing since I should be getting a new municipal fiber connection soon.
CGNAT should be illegal.
Yeah, I can set up a VPN pretty easily, it’s just annoying that I need to do it.
Namecheap supports ddns out of the box too, no additional service required. You just need a cron job that calls their API to update your IP periodically.
Ah perfect! Thanks for the additional info
…none. I donate to foss projects monthly though so it’s a subscription in spirit but it’s not really classified as a subscription
Can you list a few of them?
Off the top of my head: Lemmy, Lemmee, Signal, Molly, and Jellyfin
Kagi, Sider, YouTube Premium.
I’ve been hearing good things about Kagi.
Google search got so bad I use DDG by default now, but that seems to be Bing by another name and itself seems to be deteriorating.
I use Qwant and Startpage on my phone and PC, I’m happy with both
Subscribe to?
None.
That is out of priciple to me, I refuse to have automatically renews subscriptions on my card.
I will however buy gift cards for services and buy new as I need them.
For that, I have one.
Geoguessr.
That game has helped me a shitload when I have been depressed, and now that I can afford it I buy gift cards for the time when I can’t in the future.
- Bitwarden
- Racknerd VPS
- Backblaze B2
- PIA VPN
- Purelymail
- Usenet
- ChatGPT API
And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.
How do you all use ChatGPT API? Any tools that interface well with it?
My main use is chatgptbox with my instance of searxng. Also comes in handy when looking for a shell command or script with ai-shell.
Then there’s the various integrations in documents, notes, etc…
various integrations in documents, notes
Tell us about these integrations please
Nothing complicated. Nextcloud assistant with nextcloud office and generating emails in fairemail.
I assume they’re talking about this api
Any tools that interface well with it?
Lots of tools, but it depends on where you want to use it. For example, inside Obsidian you can use it as a text generator
Inside VSCode you can use something like AI Genie
If you just want to use it raw, you can use postman
- Nebula, to support YT creators while spiting YT
- A Domain name provider for my web domain
That’s it. I don’t quite avoid subscriptions like the plague anymore, but I still almost never pay for them.